Casino City's Friday Five: Everything ever edition

Are there any studies on why everything seems to happen at once? (We looked and couldn't find anything appropriately scientific. However, the internet did lead us, as it often does, to some great cat videos, so we consider it time well spent.)

As you may have guessed, a lot of things happened at once this week. And they were big things: WSOP's live broadcast schedule, the opening of the MGM Cotai, and the U.K. Gambling Commission putting its foot down with regards to unfair online promotions (about time!). For some extra flavor, we threw in news about Massachusetts political intrigue. We know, it's a lot to chew on for a weekend.

4. Online gambling wagers to eclipse $1 trillion by 2022Numbers have been crunched, data has been compiled, and the projections are clear: Online gambling is big, and it's only going to get bigger. So says Juniper Research, who reported that online gambling wagers will surpass $1 trillion by 2022. Yes, trillion. This year alone, wagers are expected to reach $700 billion, which makes last year's $620 billion in revenue seem puny.

The report also calls attention to chatbots, those handy little AI services that may just play an important role in online betting in the future as they become more widespread.

There's much talk of "disruption" on the horizon as new technologies emerge, a claim that we have no reason to doubt.

(Something else to mull over: How much have you contributed to that approaching total? We shudder to think.)

3. MGM Cotai opens doors to the publicWe talk about decadence in Las Vegas quite often, but Macau takes the crown as the land of the truly outrageous. For instance, the MGM Cotai, which opened earlier this week, is a $3.4 billion effort featuring a dynamic theater that can apparently transform into different configurations "with the push of a button." (The press release calls this theater a "meticulously engineered column-free, long-span diagrid structure, which will seem to be alive." Uh, geez.) We've also been promised some never-before-seen dining options from a series of globally acclaimed chefs.

Visitors looking to scratch their cultural itch can check out the more than 300 pieces of art that will be on display throughout the resort, 28 of which are Chinese imperial carpets from the Qing dynasty – so they could be from about 1600 to 1900.

We don't know about you, but we'd be absolutely afraid to touch anything in this place, lest we break something expensive.

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